This 80-page supplement contains 38 encounters written by many of the Dungeon Masters Guild’s best-selling writers.

Encounters in the Savage Jungles includes 23 encounters / mini-adventures of various difficulty that can be used while the adventuring party braves the uncharted and savage jungles. It also includes 15 Quick Encounters, and:

A few new creatures

New traditional weapons

New magic items

Downloadable maps (DM & Player)

Custom art

Although inspired by the Tomb of Annihilation, these encounters can be used with any official D&D campaign, or in your own home campaign. Many could even be used in forest, wilderness, or swamp settings.

These encounters are location generic and are designed to be easily added to any campaign. Use them to introduce new players, as inspiration for a new campaign, as a one-shot, or whatever else you can think of.

This is a PDF module file. If you are looking for the Fantasy Grounds VTT, click here.

Sample images:

Be the first to know about future releases, and receive infrequent newsletters by signing up to my mailing list!

Am I missing some universal syntax? What is the 'CR' listed in the table of contents and at the beginning of each encounter? Is that a substitute for appropriate player levels? I find it very confusing.

Jeff C. SMarch 03, 2019 2:01 am UTC

CREATOR

It is the Challenge Rating of the encounter.

Joshua FMarch 03, 2019 2:42 am UTC

PURCHASER

I'm still confused... I've been DMing for about 2 years now and as far as I know encounters don't have CR... monsters have CR, but not encounters. Am I just showing a huge gap in my knowledge of 5e here?

Jeff C. SMarch 03, 2019 3:27 am UTC

CREATOR

The CR of the encounter is established by the CR of the creatures used in the encounter, or by the challenge level of the overall encounter. You can use the CR to judge how difficult the encounter will be for a party of 4 to 5 characters, just as you would when using a single creature.

Chuck WMarch 03, 2019 3:34 am UTC

Let me try to help. In 5e, encounter difficulty is determined by XP thresholds. This is a refined version of the system introduced in 4e that had encounter levels that related to XP. Before that, encounter difficulty was determined by encounter challenge rating, which was just the monsters' CR's added together.

I don't think many who learned to DM before 4e pay much attention to the XP thresholds (not in my experience). These involve new tables that weren't needed previously and some new math for party adjustments and encounter multipliers. The new system is surely more precise than the previous challenge system. However, the old challenge system is as simple as comparing the total of the monsters' challenge ratings and the adjusted party level. When you see a CR 5 encounter, you know it is appropriate for an average-sized 5th-level party. That is much easier than a 2000XP encounter which can be compared to a party's combined threshold total, that can be found on the new table on DMG 82 using easy,...See more medium, hard, or deadly difficulty.

The new system(s) didn't break encounter CR's because the monsters still have them and they still roughly related to character levels. That's why most DM's just look for an encounter CR that matches their party's level. It's really easy and works as a rough guideline.

EDIT: I started typing this before you replied, Jeff. I didn't mean to step on your toes here. I've used encounter CR's for around 15 years and I learned to fine-tune encounters by feel. It might not hurt to have encounter XP's for newer DM's who use the threshold system and don't have a feel for how well an encounter matches their party's capabilities.

Joshua FAugust 28, 2019 4:11 am UTC

PURCHASER

I get what you both are saying, but I reiterate that CR does not refer to encounters in 5e. I guess at this point it is less of a question as it was originally, and is more of a comment or criticism. In 5e, encounters/areas/adventures are just rated 'appropriate for' certain levels (or tiers of play) using natural language.

For example, taken right out of TftYP; "This adventure takes place in the Doomvault. It is designed for 9th-level characters. By the end of the story, they are likely to advance to 11th level or perhaps higher … if they don’t end up dead in Thay."

Or, what might be better is to just list the encounters as you do, but with no mention of level balance. Then, in the introduction, use a table to list out the encounters and their appropriate levels similar to the way it is done in Curse of Strahd.

As it is, using CR in regards to an entire encounter is just plain confusing for those (of there are many) who's experience begins with 5e.

This is a must-have for anybody running Tomb of Annihilation or another jungle setting. While the encounter tables provided in the base module are decent, these more fleshed out and story-driven encounters provide plenty of fun side-adventures to take [...]

JUST WHAT I NEEDED. I plan to use several of these in Tomb of Annihilation to keep the journey from Orulunga to Omu from being a tedious slog through dense jungle and roll-generated zombie and dinosaur encounters. [...]

This supplement is a collection of encounters which are fun to play and can be dropped into any game with a little bit of effort. The writing is great and the collaborative effort makes this a very versatile supplement which caters to a wide variety of [...]

These products were created by scanning an original printed edition. Most older books are in scanned image format because original digital layout files never existed or were no longer available from the publisher.

For PDF download editions, each page has been run through Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software to attempt to decipher the printed text. The result of this OCR process is placed invisibly behind the picture of each scanned page, to allow for text searching. However, any text in a given book set on a graphical background or in handwritten fonts would most likely not be picked up by the OCR software, and is therefore not searchable. Also, a few larger books may be resampled to fit into the system, and may not have this searchable text background.

For printed books, we have performed high-resolution scans of an original hardcopy of the book. We essentially digitally re-master the book. Unfortunately, the resulting quality of these books is not as high. It's the problem of making a copy of a copy. The text is fine for reading, but illustration work starts to run dark, pixellating and/or losing shades of grey. Moiré patterns may develop in photos. We mark clearly which print titles come from scanned image books so that you can make an informed purchase decision about the quality of what you will receive.

Original electronic format

These ebooks were created from the original electronic layout files, and therefore are fully text searchable. Also, their file size tends to be smaller than scanned image books. Most newer books are in the original electronic format. Both download and print editions of such books should be high quality.